More about Puppeteers - A Host of Characters

"Puppeteers are highly intelligent, herbivorous, and as a species, very old. Their corner on interstellar business is as old as the human Bronze Age. And they are cowards.”

The Relic of the Empire, Neutron Star, Larry Niven

Neutron Star a Preface

“The human is a highly complex organism, motivated by a variety of emotions- curiosity, courage, cussedness, love, hatred, boredom, and a combination of others.

The puppeteers were gentle-in fact one of their most laudable and dominate characteristics was cowardice-which made for a very high survival factor. At least for puppeteers.

The most admirable thing of course, was that they were willing, (and very able) to pay others aliens to take the risks they were morally obliged not to take themselves. Which appealed highly to the greed in certain life-forms.

Notably homo sapiens…”

Neutron Star, Larry Niven, Ballantine Books, 1968

A Host of Characters - Puppeteer’s an Alien Race

"A puppeteer is unique. Imagine a headless three-legged centaur wearing two Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent puppets on its arms, and you will have something like the right picture. But the arms are weaving necks and the puppets are real heads, flat and brainless, with wide flexible lips. The brain is under a bony hump set between the base of the neck. This puppeteer wore only its own coat of brown hair, with a mane that extended all the way up its spine to form a thick mat over the brain.

I watched with the rest as it came across the floor, not because I’d never seen a puppeteer, but because there is something beautiful about the dainty way they move on those slender legs and tiny hooves.

A puppeteers mouth are not only the most flexible speech organs around, but they also have the most sensitive hands. The tongues are forked and pointed: the wide thick lips have little finger-like knobs along the rims."

Neuton Star, Larry Niven

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Neuton Star, was first published in 1968, is short story by Larry Niven. Neuton Star was publised by Ballatine Books as a collection of Niven short fiction.

Others in this series.

Edited on 5/21/23 @ 11:56 PM: I had forgotten to add quotation marks; 5/23/23 @ 12:04 PM: Added link above